The present disclosure relates to image-guided surgical navigation. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to image-guided surgical navigation of spinal procedures using intraoperative surface detection.
A common problem in image-guided surgery of the spine is to correctly associate fiducials selected in volumetric image data of the patient with the fiducials intraoperatively selected on the patient for intraoperative registration. In procedures related to the spine, these fiducials are usually associated with a spinal level, which means that the surgeon must correctly locate the spinal level intraoperatively on the patient from which corresponding fiducials have been selected in the volumetric image data. This is often difficult, and as a result, surgeons are often required to check which spinal levels to operate on using imaging modalities involving X-rays to obtain a view of the spine beyond what's visible from the surgical incision.